“That’s why Ubisoft had a team dedicated solely to building the PC version of Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag, working on everything from the UI to the controls to wide range of settings encountered in PC gaming. It’s absolutely not true that we don’t care about PC optimization,” Trottier said. “If we didn’t care about PC optimization, then we would not have such a big team dedicated just to the PC version in Kiev.

“We are very proud of the PC version of Black Flag: the game runs well on low-end PCs, and lots of additional features were added for higher-end machines, allowing each and every customer to fully enjoy the experience on their PCs. Our partnership with Nvidia that saw our respective engineering teams work together to develop a highly optimized PC version also demonstrates our commitment to the platform.

“If you can see our game run at 4k resolution on PC, it’s magical. It’s beautiful.”

Trottier said when it came time to optimize the game, the team started on PC first, not only for logistical reasons, but but because it was also the environment the engineers were most familiar with – at least during these early days of next-gen. Trottier also said due to PS4 and Xbox One being so similar to PCs, any learnings from PC optimization could be readily applied to the systems.

“If, say, the team finds a way to shave 50% off the GPU burden for a particular effect, they can then expect a roughly equivalent savings on both next-gen consoles, and they can be confident in their ability to apply those savings,” he said. “It’s not 100% linear, but at least it gives you an order of magnitude.”